“Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“There are problems with the wombat," Nathan Schick said. "I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but God, Herbie, no offence... Lee-Anne... but the wombat is not star quality.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
Peter Carey
Born place: in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
Born date May 7, 1943
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“There on the landing sits the typewriter. It is clogged with dust, the ribbon dried and flimsy. Looking at it gives Felix a feeling close to vertigo. He realises he can replicate in his head the exact sound it used to make. The clac-clac-a-clac of the metal letters hitting the paper, the ribbon raising itself each time to make the impression. The machine-gun fire of it, when the work was going well. The stops and pauses when it wasn't, to allow for a sigh, a draw on a cigarette. The ding every time the carriage reached its limit. The whirr as the page was snatched out, then the rolling ratcheting as a new one was wound in.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Hand That First Held Mine
“I'm serious, Mar, I don't know how to act around him now. I can't be nice, because he'll hate that. But I can't be mean just to be nice."
"You really need medication."
"I'm in a quandary. A Catch-22. I'm screwed.”
― Kristin Walker, quote from A Match Made in High School
“The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from Sorcerer's Apprentice
“I suspect that much of life is like that. We seldom see what is closest to our eyes.”
― Jack Whyte, quote from Uther
“ Two daiquiris
withdrew into a corner of a gorgeous room
and one told the other a lie.”
― John Berryman, quote from The Dream Songs
Balthazar
Deep in the Heart
Sunset Park
A Mathematician's La...
Kitty's House of Hor...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
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